‘Why don’t I add my £120,000 to your £80,000?’ suggested the man on the platform. ‘Then we could get something better.’
We?
I don’t remember an introduction, as he strolled across to where I stood at the foot of the escalator, leaning on the wall where it opened onto the dark, uninviting railway platform at Gatwick airport. Deserted except for the two of us, we were much too early for the first train. He must have asked if I was going to Brighton. I was. He wasn’t; he was going home, which was somewhere along the way. He didn’t look as if he’d been on a wild night out, but I wasn’t registering much at five in the morning, after a four-hour flight on which I hadn’t slept a wink.
Uncommonly, we’d got straight onto house-buying. He’d probably asked where I lived, forcing me into the now standard response of ‘nowhere, actually’.
‘We could go to Portugal,’ he ventured, after I’d muttered something about Brexit taking away my choices. Portugal was supposed to be the easiest EU country to obtain a residency visa for, I concurred, but I didn’t know it well and wasn’t sure if it was my place. I was playing along to the best of my ability. It was a game, wasn’t it?
‘I don’t like it all that much,’ he screwed up his nose. ‘It’s too backward.’
He’d lived there before. He’d also lived in Dubai. Did I like Dubai? I admitted that it wasn’t really my thing, and began to explain why. He was losing interest. He’d cut short the suggestion of New York, on seeing my expression. He was a dog person; he wasn’t impressed by the assertion I needed cats. The conversation turned to investing: how could I increase my capital, now that our joining of resources didn’t seem such a good idea after all? The flirtation, of course, was simply passing the time, and I was barely participating. I wanted to lie down.
‘I don’t sleep much,’ he confessed. ‘My brain is too active.’
I wondered what he did for work, if he had thousands of pounds floating around ready to give to random, unknown women twenty years his senior. He wasn’t a bad-looking chap, now I’d looked properly. With dark brown skin and close-cropped, African hair he was tall, strong and expensively, if casually, dressed. He had approached me because I was the only other being in sight in the chill of dawn, and he was tossing out ideas, seeing if they fit.
He dealt in crypto currency and was very wealthy, he confided. He could offer me more than £120,000 then, I didn’t say. In my weary, semi-attentive state I mused upon whether I would think him attractive, in a more appropriate setting. We’d been interacting for around half an hour; I’ve had shorter relationships. But he found me weird, I could tell.
Perhaps for the first time, now that I have broken free and am clearer about what I want – and don’t want – in life, I saw myself through a stranger’s eyes and understood that I am, in fact, odder than most. This is undoubtedly why I’m still single, and surely why I’m happy to stay that way. I am The Cat That Walked by Himself. I loved that Just-So story as a young child, and even then, I saw myself thus. My mother chastised me as pretentious when I declared a shared identity with The Fool on the Hill, though she didn’t fully understand what I was getting at. Only-children are self-sufficient children, and I have always been content with my own company. The missing point, however, is that I’m simply not like many other people. That knowledge – that inability to find one’s tribe – is far lonelier than being alone.
I don’t desire the things most people seem to crave. Instead, what I value most is what those around me would hasten to change. Freedom is everything. Solitude is divine. In April, I’ll have been technically homeless for two years, and I’ve relished every minute of it. That’s not to say I’m not (kind-of) looking forward to settling into a cosy space once again, finding a suitable place to paint, and being reunited with my Highland Stoneware bowls which I miss eating out of. But I’m incredibly fussy about the attributes that place must have, and I am not prepared to compromise.
‘You can’t have everything,’ declared a friend in a rather negative moment. ‘You’re not going to find it all in the one property, are you?’
I most certainly will, though it might be a bit tricky on my tiny budget. A substantial cash injection would have been very welcome indeed – if no strings were attached. But it seems, after all, that no strings were even considered. As the train finally pulled into the station, the doors opened and a small handful of people climbed aboard, the chatty, rich man, whose name I never asked, stepped into a different carriage.
…
Kipling, R. (1902) ‘The Cat That Walked by Himself.’ Just-So Stories, Macmillan, London
Lennon-McCartney. (1967) ‘The Fool on the Hill.’ From Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles. EMI, London